The democratic way of prohibition: how the party of pot smokers ended up standing in the way of pharmacological freedom.

AuthorWelch, Matt
PositionFrom the Top

THE MOST illuminating ride-along I've ever gone on was a three-hour bus tour of South Los Angeles with City Councilman Bernard Parks, who represents the area that before two deadly riots was known as South-Central L.A. and Watts.

Parks is not exactly my favorite public official. He draws a combined taxpayer-funded salary/pension of more than $400,000 a year, and as L.A.'s police chief in the 1990s he stonewalled corruption probes while alienating good officers with petty penalties for minor internal violations. But Parks is far more willing than his colleagues on the city council to deviate from the local Democratic consensus on issues from rent control to eminent domain. Above all, he's a blunt-spoken fellow, providing a rare warts-and-all glimpse into a certain governing mind-set.

On this day in 2007, cruising down the boulevards near the epicenter of the riots that followed the acquittal of the cops who beat Rodney King, Parks' mind was on the kinds of establishments he was sick of seeing in his neighborhoods. "Auto-related business, auto-related business, fried chicken restaurant, liquor store, fast-food restaurant," he and his top aides would say, pointing out the window as we passed them by. If only those Del Tacos could be replaced by sit-down family restaurants, those used-tire lots by Whole Foods outlets, the area could finally begin making an economic comeback.

Parks' solution: Ban the "blight." As a first step, by a unanimous vote in the summer of 2008, the L.A. City Council prohibited the construction or expansion of fast food restaurants in South Los Angeles. You could still build a McDonald's in nearby (and more prosperous) Lakewood. But creating burger-flipping opportunities near Florence and Normandie was deemed bad for the neighborhood.

It's important to point out that the political class supporting the fast food moratorium does not, as a rule, dislike poor minorities. Parks is black, the mayor of L.A. is Latino, and community activists in favor of the ban actually used the phrase "food apartheid" to describe the state of affairs before mostly white central planners zoned away consumer choice for half a million mostly nonwhite residents. They genuinely believe that punishing some of the few businesses willing to serve troubled neighborhoods is a necessary precondition to bringing in the commercial chains they prefer, such as Trader Joe's, Mimi's, or Starbucks (though never Walmart).

Two pathologies stand out here. One is...

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